Catherine Leroy

Catherine Leroy was born on August 27, 1944 in Sannois (France), and died on July 8, 2006 in Santa Monica (United States).
Coming from a bourgeois background, Catherine Leroy played the piano then gave up and took up skydiving. In her club, she meets a former journalist who covered the war in Indochina.
In 1966, at the age of 21, Catherine Leroy left for Vietnam to cover the war there.

Described by her colleagues as a small, frail woman, she was "a somewhat mythical figure in the world of war photography, one of the rare women present in Vietnam during the harshest period of the conflict", indicated to the AFP in Arles Robert Pledge, director of the Contact Press Images agency.

Catherine "had a reputation as a photographer of extraordinary and proverbial courage and willpower that made the envy of her male competitors", he said. The photographer had thus been the only one to be parachuted at night with American troops and had been taken prisoner by the Vietcong at the Battle of Hue, he said.
She had indeed been the only journalist accredited by the Americans in 1967 to participate in an airborne intervention with the 173rd Parachute Regiment during Operation "Junction City".
This is where she photographed on April 30, 1967 near Khe Sanh, a marine near a dead comrade on Hill 881S.

Then working in Lebanon, she was "kidnapped and horribly brutalized, and never really readjusted to a more sedentary and easier life afterwards", he added.

Settled in the United States where she photographed a little fashion and magazines, she had produced a book on the great photographers of Vietnam, published by Random House. She has won numerous awards (George Polk Award, the Sigma Delta Chi, The Art Director's Club of New York...), and was the first woman to receive the Robert Capa Prize for her coverage of the civil war in Lebanon in 1976.

For me it is the picture of a young girl of 21 years old, with pig tails, who will jump in parachute at 30 April 1967 with 173e regiment of parachutists.